Word: coonskin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Tennessee's Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver was a glad-hander who never managed to look really glad. He was a campaigner who achieved a kind of glum sincerity even when his head was smothered under an outlandish coonskin cap. He was given to platitudes that put him foursquare in favor of "the best interests of the plain people of this nation" and "an even break for the average man." Some of his Senate colleagues insisted that there was a vacuum in the space between his ears. And he was a loner who became anathema to the national Democratic hierarchy...
Admission of Guilt. With his ear-to-ear grin and coonskin cap routine, Estes Kefauver has often been dismissed by pundits as an excessively folksy light weight. But in his battle against "Tip" Taylor, the Keef showed bracing political courage. When Taylor called him a traitor to the South for voting for the 1957 and 1960 civil rights bills, Kefauver defended the bills on the steps of every courthouse where he could draw a crowd. "I shall continue to favor the expansion of the right to vote," he said in Memphis, Tennessee's most strongly segregationist city, "until every...
...that civil rights bill, but Senator Kefauver voted for it.* Every state is entitled to two Senators. New York has two Senators to represent the people there, and I am tired of us supplying them with an extra Senator. He votes just like Hubert Humphrey." Estes discarded his old coonskin cap in favor of a straw hat that once belonged to Franklin Roosevelt, and tried his darndest to tiptoe past Tip's torrential accusations...